Category Archives: Inspiration

This doesn’t mean that we deny the pain + suffering that’s happening in the world (or in ourselves). These things are very real. This isn’t about pushing away what we don’t want to see, but about making conscious choices about where we put our attention – do we tend our fears or grow our joy?

When you’re a sensitive creature (like me + probably you too?) you can get really swallowed up. Just going to the news + social media sites each morning, I can feel myself armoring up for the assault on my system. What’s happened today? What new tragedy, betrayal, political firestorm… I try to let in what I can let in + be in action where I can be in action… but holy smokes. It’s a lot.

What I know (as someone who ebbs and flows with depression and anxiety) is that creative practices save me.

They save me by reminding me of my own light.
They remind me of the beauty in the world.
They keep me calibrated. Buoyant. They keep me connected to my truth.
They help me turn my attention toward the goodness.

I practice these things in my micro-world so that I can show up and be a certain kind of person in the macro. My intention is to be a bright light in my community and be a force of healing and good. It does not do anyone any good for me to get swallowed up by the news and crawl into bed feeling helpless. Or collapse into a what’s-the-point-it’s-all-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket... which I definitely feel sometimes.

And so I practice. I practice strengthening my joy muscles.

The practice really started with me carrying my camera every day + and getting more present – What’s interesting about this moment?What’s beautiful? What’s the light doing? What are the juxtapositions of color that I can see right now?Ooooooohhh…. look at those lemons against that blue sky. Click. Click. That’s so beautiful… and my energy would slowly shift.

These little photo safaris became like medicine for me.

And we always offer the medicine that we most need.

And so… I offer the medicine of these creative practices + waking up to beauty because that’s what feeds me and nourishes me and I want to share it. That’s why I’m here and why I do this work.

I focus on photo classes because they are so accessible and easy! We all have our little phones with us and can take 10 minutes each day to remember that there is another reality that lives in real time alongside our default one.

$49 Class begins this Monday, July 30th, 2018

I got quiet over the last several years. Separation, divorce, dating… suddenly my stories were not just my own but intertwined with others in very real ways. I wasn’t sure what I could share anymore. I didn’t want to hurt anyone. Everything felt too private + I was afraid of being judged. Aside from my weekly writing group, I stopped writing entirely.

This has been a huge loss to my spirit.

There’s a price we pay when we hide, when we cut off our voices, when we stop sharing our truth (even to ourselves). My joy has suffered for it.

I did this most of my life. Kept my opinions to myself, only said what I thought others wanted to hear, was polite and didn’t make waves. It’s a good survival strategy – one that can keep you safe. And for a long time, that’s all I really wanted.

It was through art that I finally found my voice again. I painted and made jewelry and took photographs and it was joyous to find this other language for my heart to speak. With visual art, no one could tell me I was wrong or silence me… it was just my expression. A language all my own.

Writing has been a different edge. It takes much bigger courage for me to share this way, especially when I am out of practice. But I am coming out of hiding! Peeking my head out of the covers because I know my spirit is hungry for it. Starved for it in fact.

What does it cost us when we trade our truth/our voice/our creative expression for safety?

Aliveness, connection, joy.

For me, it also means feeling alone in the world. Not lonely exactly, but alone in my experiences. All those years of sharing so openly with my community here reminded me that we are all suffering in similar ways. We all hunger for the same things. We all want to feel seen. We all want to feel connected to each other.

It takes courage to lay the words down, to share our art, to push publish. Our ego will try to shut it down – This is crap. What can you possibly say that hasn’t been said? No one’s going to read it anyway.

And yet. The impulse is still there. The hunger to connect, to share what’s in our hearts, to be of service in some small way. The hope that if one person is touched, it will be worth it.

So here I am, sharing the tiniest window into my heart. Baby steps. Inviting you to stick with me for a while and create this gorgeous little community anew.

And because I always like to offer a question back to you: Can you think of a time when you were hiding? What happened? What did it cost you?

I was in Colorado all weekend for my nephew Caleb’s bar mitzvah. (That’s Caleb and I in the photo above) The day started off full of sunshine – complete with sundresses and bare feet – but by the afternoon there were tiny balls of ice pouring from the sky! What the what?

So we did what any curious Californians would do – we ran outside with a mason jar! Nico grabbed a handful of ice and put it in his mouth, Ben stuck his hand inside the jar until it was numb and I giggled and felt more alive than usual for having run outside in a hail storm. I love how kids understand this intuitively… that to experience wonder fully, all the senses are necessary.

Another highlight of my trip was spending time with my sister’s niece Hannah. She is an incredible artist and poet who just graduated from college + is a total kindred spirit. She leads a poetry camp for girls each summer in Bolinas, CA (hit reply if you want more deets on this) and as she was telling me about it – tea parties, poetry walks, fairy houses – I realized that I do something similar for grownups!

We are reminding ourselves and each other to see the world through creative eyes.

We are connecting in deep ways to our spirits and nourishing ourselves with color and play and the joy of being with others. Simple things. But things that get lost in the busy busy.

I wish we could all be in the same room for a tea party. We would eat pastries + drink earl grey + tell each other stories. We would walk through the streets capturing the beauty we find. We would write love notes and paste them on mirrors in public restrooms. We would remind each other that it’s okay to be imperfect, to not have it all together… and that we don’t have to pretend for each other.

Get this! I was contemplating one of the creative photo prompts for the course – thinking about how we might be able to find things in the world that match the color palette of what we are wearing on a given day.Sort of like your own personal camouflage… where if you stood in front of a bright pink wall for example, you might blend in.I wondered if it was too complex, when lo and behold, the woman in line in front of me at the grocery store said, “Sorry, gotta just grab one more thing!” No problem, I replied.

She returned with a bunch of beets in her hand. “Oh my goodness!” I practically shouted. “You match those beets perfectly!”

I explained that I am a photographer and teach creative courses and that I was contemplating a prompt just like this… she let me take her photo and then beamed at me the whole way out of the store. It’s possible I made her day + I know she made mine. Just a simple moment of spontaneous connection with a stranger (where I got to share my delight in all things creativity and color) was pure gold to me.

It was also a beautiful nod from the Universe. Go girl! it seemed to say. You’re on the right track!

In a world that often overwhelms, that makes me want to crawl under the covers and hide, creative play is a balm. It nourishes me in the best possible ways.

It reminds me of who I am at my core.
It reminds me of my aliveness and my joy.
And when I feel like I’ve lost my sparkle, it helps me discover it again.

If your heart did a little leap when you saw the lady with the beets, this class is for you. Or if you’ve lost your sparkle, please join me in this creative adventure.

Yesterday, my friend Laurel and I taught a daylong manifesting workshop. The space was filled with really incredible women and we ushered them through a process of letting go of their 2017 (at times with tears for how hard this year was for so many of us) and welcoming and visioning 2018.

Because I co-led with Laurel (who is an angel practitioner) we also held an angel circle. This means that Laurel embodies a tribe of angels – Josephus and the Wisdom Council – and they speak through her. As she spoke, I realized that I had never actually witnessed Laurel (or anyone else) channel. All of my sessions with her (and there have been many!) have been on the phone, so it was such a treat to see her do her work in person. With her eyes closed, she fielded questions from participants and offered wise advice and energy clearing for all of us.

Most importantly (and what I love most about circles of women) is that the personal is almost always the universal. A question from an individual is a question for the collective. There wasn’t anything that someone asked that didn’t somehow feel relatable to my own life…

This morning, still filled with all that good energy from yesterday, I went on a little hike. I was listening to music (on random shuffle) as I walked and decided to ask the angels for some guidance. “Okay angel friends! Can you have the next song that comes on be a special message from you to me?”

At first I didn’t recognize the song that came on, but I started listening to the words.

Who can turn the world on with her smile?

Who can take a nothing day, and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile?

It started to sound familiar, something from my childhood… Could it be? Oh my goodness, it is! It’s from the Mary Tyler Moore show! I laughed. How in god’s name did this get on my phone??? And then I listened to the words.

How will you make it on your own?

This world is awfully big, girl this time you’re all alone

This was the PRECISE anxiety I woke up with. A little electric current of fear: “Oh my goodness, I just bought a car. Will I be able to make payments and rent? Will I be able to take care of my kids? Oh my god oh my god, can I pull of this single mom thing??”

Your are most likely to succeedYou have the looks and charmsAnd girl you know that’s all you needAll the men around adore youThat sexy look will do wonders for you

Love is all around, no need to waste itYou can have the town, why don’t you take it?You might just make it after all

You’re gonna make it after all

So yeah, the part about the looks and charm and sexiness is a little outdated (ha!) but the sentiment was so good it made me smile. Love is all around, no need to waste it! You can have a town, why don’t you take it? You’re gonna make it after all!

I felt like cheering or doing that Mary Tyler Moore hat-in-the-air toss as she arrives at her apartment building. Whether it was in fact the angels speaking to me or not didn’t matter. I had gotten my message. The one I most needed to hear today.

Want to try it? Do a little meditation where you ask the angels/Spirit/God/your higher self/your intuition for a secret message. Then randomly play a song and listen to the words.

What is your secret message in song?

On Christmas Day, I woke up alone. I’m Jewish, so this isn’t quite as terrible as it sounds, but there was that feeling, that thud in my chest of Where are my children? How is it that I don’t get to see their sweet faces beaming and bursting as they open presents today? I imagined them tearing at the paper with glee, squealing as they removed each treasure from their stocking. I imagined them with their grandparents and cousins getting so much delicious attention, playing board games in their pajamas, eating pancakes.

Anyway, we have these moments right? Those moments when we take a mental inventory and judge how far we’ve come. How the heck did I get here? I never thought my life would look like this. What have I accomplished? How is it possible that I’m a single mom? This is so strange and not at all what I planned…

I looked at my phone. Want to come downstairs and watch the girls open presents? It was my sweet neighbor downstairs, a fellow single mama with two little girls. She gets it. She is the one who, when I am away on a trip and flying home, will turn on some lights in my apartment and put the heater on so that I don’t come home to a cold, empty house. Yeah, that kind of friend.

Yes! I texted back smiling.

I came down and watched them open gifts. They cheered after every box was opened. I took in their pure delight – the perfect proxy – and it was so good. And the girls made me gifts as well- a friendship bracelet in oranges and purples and a gorgeous hand-knit square in ombre blues, perfect for my altar.

The last two Christmases I have gone on a hike in Tennessee Valley. You can guess from the photo why… a long, gorgeous walk to the ocean. You land at a wild little cove with roiling waves, not the kind of water you would dare swim in, but the kind you bow to. The power and beauty is massive and overwhelming. You feel small there, but in the best possible way. You feel held because it’s so clear that it’s not about you, that there is so much more, that there is an entire Universe that has big plans. I like being humbled this way.

I picked up a smooth, black stone and held it in my palm facing the water. May I let go of whatever stands in the way of love and flow. I chanted this to myself as I took a few steps toward the water. May I let go of whatever stands in the way of love and flow. Then I threw the rock and watched the waves swallow it up.

Do you remember those pneumatic tubes from way back when? Your parents would drive along the side of the bank and deposit a check into that tube and it would shoot straight up into the ether. I couldn’t ever figure out where exactly it went but I like to imagine it went up to the sky, to the clouds, to the world of magical things!

This is also how I like to imagine our dreams, our wishes, our intentions… like the one I made at the ocean. We write it, speak it, and then we let it go. We put it in the cosmic pneumatic tube and it shoots up into the Mystery.

This is a nice visual for the way we invite magic to co-create with us, to dance with us. We don’t have to do it all alone. I repeat: We don’t have to do it all alone.

Is there something you want to put in the Tube for 2018?

Feel free to make a comment or hit reply and leave it here. I will gather all the wishes and send them up. Consider this your virtual portal into the World of Magic.

I’ve been listening to a book lately by Deepak Chopra called Synchrodestiny and it’s an amazing book about manifesting change and creating abundance in your life using intention and synchronicity. Since he’s a scientist, the book is heavy on quantum theory and mind-bending things like particles that can exist in two places at one time… but I love that he does this with full reverence and honoring of the magic and mystery too.

He also explains a theory about how things don’t actually exist for us that we don’t have language for, that we don’t have a concept around. They are literally invisible to us/our brains because we don’t have the software to process them.

Like that story of the South Indian island that had always been isolated, and how when explorers arrived on big ships and the islanders asked “How did you arrive here?” the Europeans said, “The ships,” pointing to the ocean. But since the islanders had no concept of “ship” they literally couldn’t see them in the water.

I had a flicker of understanding this recently when walking in downtown Berkeley the other night. My date and I peered into the window of a cafe and watched the people inside for several moments. “It’s a board game cafe,” he said, and it took me several beats more to actually see that what I was looking at was not people sitting across from each other with mugs of tea and chatting, but a full cafe of wall-to-wall people playing Parcheesi, Sorry, and The Settlers of Catan.

I saw what I expected to see, not what was right in front of me. Only when my friend said, “board game cafe” did it all come into focus. And there has to be a reason why I’m telling you this, why this story won’t leave me alone.

Maybe this is the point: We see what we expect to see, not what is right in front of us.

And maybe this is wisdom for me right now or wisdom for you. That we can choose other ways of seeing, that we can be open to other realms and other ways of knowing. We can create new possibilities and experiences if we can let go of the rigid ways and habits we have cultivated.

What was that quote by Anais Nin? “We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.”

As I navigate the world of dating these days, I am having to manage my energy and mind in big ways. It’s easy to get lost in fantasy… to see things as I want to see them and not as they are. It’s easy to get lost in negative fantasy too – to make the person wrong or bad, to cast them away as flawed so as to not be in that vulnerable middle place where we just don’t have enough information or lived experience yet.

I watch myself vacillate between these two extremes… and the up and down can be uncomfortable, even crushing at times. I shared this with my friend Carvell recently, telling him how excited I was about a new person I was seeing. “I’m afraid to be too excited though,” I told him, “because I get excited about people and then I get disappointed and I plummet… I want to let myself have the excitement, but I also don’t want to keep skidding on the rocks.”

He responded in the wisest possible way: “Here’s the thing. Right now, all you know is that you’re excited about this person. And… you don’t have a lot of information. Anything else you add is fantasy – positive or negative.” This has become my own little personal incantation: I’m excited about this person and I don’t have a lot of information… I chant this to myself when I see myself go to extremes. It keeps me grounded in what’s true. It helps me see things as they are.

“But ponies aren’t real…” Nico said to me yesterday as we walked away from school, his warm little palm in mine. I laughed, “Yes they are! They are baby horses!”

“Oh, right!” he replied. “It’s donkeys that aren’t real!”

And for a moment I didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t.

I recalled seeing a burro in San Miguel de Allende just a few days ago. Mati and I were walking to a rooftop restaurant to watch the sunset and have a cocktail. A man was pulling a donkey, decorated in dayglo pink flowers and wool blankets with aztec patterns on them. Playing his role perfectly, the donkey was resisting… and the man pulled harder on the rope while a gringa- one of the thousands of retirees from the states – ran behind them on the cobblestone streets trying to take a picture.

Are donkeys real? for a moment I couldn’t remember.

“And unicorns?” I asked Nico. “Are they real?” I liked not remembering. I liked not being certain of anything. I liked this space between… the doubt. It made me feel free. It was like theta space, those moments when you wake up and you are still between worlds – liminal space between waking and dreaming.

This is valuable territory for creative people. When you write, paint, draw it feels like magic to find this place of soft focus, to not be sure, to allow your imagination full reign.

The rational mind is more like a donkey – stubborn and sure.

There are pale pink blossoms springing up all over Berkeley these days… they were just beginning when I left for Mexico a couple of weeks ago and now they are like bright bouquets lining the streets.

Do you want to know something? They smell like corn tortillas. And I mean exactly like corn tortillas. If you close your eyes and stand in the sun while you inhale, it’s even better.

I’ve been thinking about an exercise Laurie and I did at our last workshop, one where we asked people to riff on this line: “I wish people would pay me to…” and then repeat it over and over again.

I found myself writing things like, “I wish people would pay me to cry on their couch. I wish people would pay me to tell them stories. I wish people would pay me to walk with them and show them what’s beautiful…”

And now I would add that I wish people would pay me to tell them things like this – that the cherry blossoms in spring smell like corn tortillas.

I wrote a piece for Postpartum Progress years ago about getting more help than you think you deserve. I wrote it as a love note to new moms, but I’m realizing that this mantra might apply to lots of other times in our life as well. (Like for me, now!)

Because what we think we deserve is not enough.
Because what we think we deserve is just the tiniest slice of what we actually need.

Because needing help, support, company doesn’t make you needy, it makes you human.

I’ve been practicing this lately and it’s vulnerable stuff. But honestly, I was in such a place of despair last week I really didn’t care. In addition to calling for support from my virtual community (oh my goodness. thank you) I also sent an email out to some local friends. It went something like this:

Hey sweet friends,

I’m not doing particularly well.

And I have the kids all weekend by myself.

I’m thinking having company would make a world of difference! If you have any pockets of time this weekend, or if your kids want to play, let me know.

XO

a

And then a wash of shame came over me. And some thoughts: What’s your problem? Why are you so needy? Are you ever going to have your shit together? And I remembered that mantra again – Get more help than you think you deserve.

And then there’s the other side… and I remember how honored I feel when a friend comes to me with the real deal of her life. How it feels like a blessing to be included and to be able to offer my support.

So can we just make a little deal here?

Can we just declare right now that it’s okay to not have our shit together?
That it’s okay to feel lost.
Or lonely.
Or in need.

Let’s decide that it’s actually a gift to include others in our (sometimes messy) process. That by showing our own vulnerability, we make space for others to do the same. Let’s create that kind of world for ourselves, shall we?

Some years ago a friend of mine was telling me about an icky procedure she was going to have to do the next day at the hospital. “Do you want me to go with you?” I asked. Tears welled up in her eyes. “That would be so nice,” she said. “I didn’t know I could ask for that.”

And I LOVED being there for her. I felt so happy to be the person that got to give that gift. It was good. It was her medicine and it was also mine.

Yes. Yes. Yes to this.

We can ask for this.
We need to ask for this.

This is how we are going to survive the messiness of life. This is how we are going to thrive.

We stay connected. We stay real. We stop pretending. We tell the truth.

When we do this, we are shining a light in the dark places for each other. When we offer the light of our heart, our attention and our compassion we help each other move through to the other side.

And when YOU decide to be the brave one, the one that reaches out first… you give your loved ones permission to do it the next time. You create a loop of mutual support + connection that will not only feed you, but save your sanity. This is a crazy ride folks. We need each other. Let’s be brave together.

P.S. Ready to do some Brave Blogging with me? The class begins on September 5th. More details here.